by Wilbur Smith
‘Riders! Behind us.’ Yakub pointed back along the way they had come. Far out on the sun-seared plain a tight bunch of horsemen was coming on fast. ‘They are on our tracks.’
Penrod snatched the field-glasses from him and stared back at them. They wore the jibba. He counted nine. They were covering the ground at a canter. The leaders were leaning forward in their saddles to watch the ground ahead.
‘They were waiting for us,’ said Yakub. ‘It was the pigeon that warned them.’
‘Yes! The pigeon.’ Penrod leapt to his feet. He took a last glance at the height of the sun. It was squatting wearily on the horizon and little daylight remained. The camels were ready to run, eager for water, and lunged to their feet at the first touch of the goad.
Penrod leapt into the saddle and pointed his mount’s head at the distant line of palm trees. He used the goad and it lumbered into a gallop. From behind he heard the distant thud of a rifle shot and a bullet ricocheted off the stony ground in a puff of dust and chips, but it was fifty yards out on the left. Even at such long range it was poor shooting, but the Dervish favoured the sword and the spear above the gun. They considered any expertise in the use of firearms to be effete and unmanly. The true warrior killed with the blade, man to man.
Within seconds the camels had crossed the ridge and were screened by the shale bank from further enemy fire. Penrod knew that they were no match for a good horse over the short run, but he pushed his on with cries of ‘Ha! Ha!’, the sting of the goad and urgent movements of his body. Yakub was lighter, though, and his mount drew gradually ahead.
As they raced for the edge of the palm groves Penrod searched for any sign of the horsemen he had spotted earlier. He hoped they might have ridden on towards Omdurman, and left their path open to the river. Even the best of us needs a little luck, he thought, then heard faint but excited cries from far behind. He looked back under his arm, and saw the nine horsemen sweeping over the shale bank they had just crossed. They were strung out but riding hard. There were more shots, but they flew wide. The palm groves drew closer, and he felt his confidence burgeoning. They had a clear run to the bank of the Nile.
‘Come, Effendi, watch Yakub and you will learn how to ride a camel.’ The little Jaalin tribesman laughed with delight at his own sense of humour. Both their animals were extended in full gallop, and Penrod ducked as loose pebbles flew back from the pads of the camel in front of him and flicked past his ears.
Suddenly there was a different sound of gunfire, much sharper and clearer. The band of riders he had seen earlier raced out of the grove. They must have been halted and resting among the trees, but now they had been alerted by the shots of the pursuers. All of them wore the jibba of the Dervish and were armed with spear, sword, targe and rifle. They were on a converging course, racing in from the right along the edge of the grove to cut them off from the river. Penrod narrowed his eyes as he judged their speed and the distance to where their paths would cross.
We will make it, but with little to spare, he decided. At that moment a heavy Boxer-Henry .45 calibre bullet struck Yakub’s camel in the head and killed it instantly. It dropped onto its nose and the long legs flew over its head as it tumbled. Yakub was thrown high, then struck the hard ground heavily.
Penrod knew that he must be either killed or knocked senseless. He dared not stop to help him. Baring’s messages were more important than the life of one man. None the less he was filled with dismay at the thought of leaving Yakub to the mercy of the Dervish. He knew they would give him to their women to play with. The Hadendowa woman could castrate a man, then flay every inch of skin from his body without allowing him to lose consciousness, forcing him to endure every exquisite cut of the blade. ‘Yakub!’ he bellowed, with little hope of any response, but to his astonishment Yakub clambered shakily to his feet and looked about groggily.
‘Yakub! Make ready.’ Penrod leant out sideways from the saddle. Yakub turned and ran in the same direction, to lessen the shock as they came together. They had often practised this trick in preparation for just such a moment on the battlefield or the hunting ground. Yakub was looking back over his shoulder to judge his moment. As the camel swept by him he reached up and linked arms with Penrod. He was jerked clean off his feet, but Penrod used the momentum to swing him back over the camel’s croup.
Yakub grabbed him round the waist and stuck to him like a tick to a dog. The camel ran on without check. The moment Penrod was sure that Yakub was secure he twisted in the saddle and saw that the closest Dervish was only two hundred yards out on their right flank. He rode a magnificent cream mare with a flowing golden mane. Although he wore the green turban of an emir, he was not a greybeard but a warrior in his prime, and he rode with the menace of a couched lance, slim, supple and deadly.
‘Abadan Riji!’ To Penrod’s astonishment the emir challenged him by name. ‘Since El Obeid I have waited for you to return to Sudan.’
Then Penrod remembered him. His face and figure were not easily forgotten. This was Osman Atalan, emir of the Beja.
‘I thought I had killed you there,’ Penrod shouted back. The emir had chased him as he carried the wounded Adams out of the broken square, just as the Dervish charge overwhelmed it. Osman had been riding another mount, not that lovely mare. Penrod had been up on a big strong gelding. Even burdened with Adams it had taken Osman a good half-mile to catch him. Then they rode stirrup to stirrup and shoulder to shoulder, as though riding each other off the ball in a game of polo, Osman slashing and hacking with that great silver blade, and Penrod meeting it with parries and stop hits, until his moment came. Then he feigned a straight thrust at Osman’s eyes. The Dervish threw up his targe to catch the point, and Penrod dropped his aim and hit him, driving hard under the bottom rim of the targe. He had felt his steel go well in. Osman reeled back in the saddle and his mount had swerved aside, breaking out of the trial of strength.
Looking back under his arm as he carried Adams away, Penrod had seen that Osman’s mount had slowed to a walk, and that his rider was hunched over and swaying. He had thought he was probably mortally wounded.
But that was clearly not the case, for now Osman shouted, ‘I swear on my love of the Prophet that today I will give you another chance to kill me.’
Osman’s men rode close behind him and Penrod saw that they were as dangerous as a pack of wolves. One of the aggagiers aimed his carbine and fired. The black powder smoke erupted from the muzzle and the bullet parted the air so close to Penrod’s cheek that he felt its kiss. He ducked instinctively, and heard Osman shout behind him, ‘No guns! Blades only. I want this one for my sword, for he has tainted my honour.’
Penrod faced ahead, giving all his concentration to wringing the utmost from the camel under him. They rushed towards the palm grove, but behind him he could hear the thunder of hoofs riding to a crescendo. As they rode past the first trees of the grove, he saw that he had been mistaken; this was not a field of dhurra but a dense stand of second-growth palmetto. The long needle spines could stab through the hide of a horse, but not that of a camel. He turned his mount’s head and it charged straight at the thicket.
He heard the hoofs closer behind him and the hoarse breathing of a horse at full gallop, then saw the mare’s golden head appear in the periphery of his vision.
‘Now is your chance, Abadan Riji!’ Osman called, and pushed the mare alongside the camel. Penrod leant across the narrow gap and thrust at his turbaned head, but Osman swayed back and kept his targe low, sneering at Penrod over the rim. ‘The fox never comes twice to the snare,’ he said.
‘You learn swiftly,’ Penrod conceded, and caught the great crusader sword on his own slim blade, turning it in the air so that it flew past his head. He steered the camel with his toes against its neck into the thicket of spiny palmetto. The camel crashed through, but Osman turned aside, breaking off his attack rather than lame or cripple the mare.
He galloped furiously round the edge of the thicket while the camel ran straight through. He
had lost at least a hundred paces as he came back into the camel’s tracks and rode hard to catch up with it again.
Penrod saw the wide expanse of the Nile directly ahead, a shimmering luminescence in the fading light. The camel bounded forward under him as it, too, saw the river. Penrod carried the sabre in his right hand, with the goad and the reins in the left. ‘Yakub, take my pistol!’ he said softly. ‘And for the love and mercy of Allah, try this time to aim fair and shoot straight.’
Yakub reached round his body and pulled the Webley from his sash. ‘The remarkable Yakub will slay this false emir with a single shot,’ he cried, took deliberate aim and closed both eyes before he fired.
Osman Atalan did not flinch at the crack of the shot: he came on swiftly, but he had seen how close they were to the riverbank. He swung the mare in across the camel’s rump, and stood in the stirrups with the long sword poised.
Penrod saw that he had changed his attack, and that he meant to cripple the camel with a deep cut through the hamstrings. With a stab of the goad and a hard tug on the reins he swung the beast’s shoulder into the mare. Standing off balance in his stirrups Osman could not respond swiftly enough to counter the turn, and the two animals came together with the impetus of their combined weights. The camel was almost twice the height of the mare at the shoulder, and half again as heavy. She reeled and went down on her front knees. Osman was thrown on to her neck.
With the skill and balance of an acrobat he retained his seat, and kept a grip on his sword. However, by the time the mare had found her feet again, the camel had pulled too far ahead for her to catch up before it reached the riverbank.
As he raced towards it Penrod had only a moment to survey the river before him. He saw that the bank was a sheer drop of ten feet and that the water below it was green and deep. It was at least a mile across to the opposite bank and three large islands of reeds and papyrus were floating down in stately procession towards Khartoum in the north. That was all he had time to observe. With Osman and his aggagiers racing up behind them he urged the camel straight to the top of the bank.
‘In God’s Name!’ shrieked Yakub. ‘I cannot swim.’
‘If you stay here the Dervish women will have your balls,’ Penrod reminded him.
‘I can swim!’ Yakub changed his mind.
‘Sensible Yakub!’ Penrod grunted, and as the camel hesitated he stabbed hard into its neck with the goad. It leapt outwards so violently that Yakub lost his grip on the Webley as he snatched at a handhold. With a gut-wrenching sensation they dropped to hit the water with a splash as high as the bank above their heads. The aggagiers reined in their horses and milled about on top of the bank, firing down at the two men floundering on the surface.
‘Stop!’ Osman shouted angrily, and knocked up the barrel of al-Noor’s carbine. His intervention came too late, for a bullet fired by one of the others hit the camel and damaged its spine. The terrified beast swam desperately with its front feet, but its paralysed back legs anchored it so that it turned in small circles, bellowing and hissing with terror. Despite the crippling injury it rode high in the water, buoyed by the inflated waterskins.
‘You think you have cheated me yet again,’ Osman shouted across the water, ‘but I am Osman Atalan, and your life belongs to me.’
Penrod guessed immediately from the emir’s tone of false bravado that, like most desert Arabs, he could not swim. For all his wild courage on land, he would never expose himself and his beautiful mare to the attack of the jinn and the monstrous Nile crocodiles that infested these waters. He would not follow his enemy over the bank into the swift green river.
For a minute longer Osman wrestled with his chivalrous instincts, his passionate desire for single combat, to avenge himself on his enemy widi the sword. Then he gave way to expediency, and made an abrupt, eloquent chopping gesture with his right hand.
‘Kill them!’ he ordered. At once his aggagiers jumped to the ground and lined the top of the bank. They aimed volley after volley at the group of bobbing heads. Penrod seized Yakub by one arm and dragged him behind the struggling camel, using it as a shield. The current carried them swiftly downstream and the aggagiers followed, running along the bank, and keeping up a hail of carbine fire. All the time the current was carrying them away from the bank and the range was opening. At last a lucky shot struck the camel in the head, and it rolled over like a log in the water.
Penrod drew the dagger from his sash, and cut loose one of the inflated skins from its saddle. ‘Hold here, brave Yakub,’ he gasped, and the terrified Arab seized the tag of rawhide rope. They abandoned the camel’s carcass, and Penrod swam them slowly out across the current towards the middle of the river.
As darkness dropped over them, with the suddenness of the African night, the shape of the Dervish on the bank faded away and only the muzzle flashes of their rifles still showed. Penrod swam with a gentle sidestroke, kicking with both legs, paddling with one hand and towing Yakub with the other by the scruff of his neck. Yakub was clinging to the skin bladder, and shivering like a half-drowned puppy. ‘There are crocodiles in this cursed river so large they could swallow a buffalo, horns and all.’ His teeth chattered and he choked on a mouthful of water.
‘Then they would not trouble themselves with a skinny little Jaalin,’ Penrod comforted him. A huge dark shape loomed out of the gloom and bore down on them. It was one of the floating islands of papyrus and reeds. He caught a handful of reeds as it drifted by, and dragged himself and Yakub up on to it. The vegetation was so densely matted and intertwined it could have supported a herd of elephants. It undulated softly under their feet as they crawled across it to the side nearest Khartoum. They squatted there, regaining their strength and gazing across at the eastern bank.
Penrod was worried that, on such a moonless night, he might not see the city when they reached it and stared into the darkness until his eyes ached. Suddenly he thought he could make out the ugly square shape of Mukran Fort, but his eyes were playing tricks and, when he stared at it, it dissolved. ‘After such a journey, it would be the height of stupidity to sail past Khartoum in the night,’ he muttered, and then his doubts were dispelled.
From downstream there came the crash of artillery fire. He leapt to his feet and peered through the papyrus stems. He saw the brilliant orange muzzle flashes of cannon demarcating the Omdurman side of the river. Seconds later the shells burst on the east bank and illuminated Khartoum’s waterfront. This time there was no mistaking the stark outline of Mukran Fort and, beyond it, the consular palace. He smiled grimly as he remembered the nightly artillery bombardment by the Dervish gunner, whom David Benbrook had dubbed the Bedlam Bedouin. ‘At least he has not run out of ammunition yet,’ he said, and explained to Yakub what they had to do.
‘We are safe here,’ Yakub demurred. ‘If we stay here the river will push us in time to the bank and we can walk ashore like men, not swim like iguanas.’
‘That will not happen until you reach the Shabluka Gorge, where this raft will surely be destroyed. You know well that the gorge is the lair of all the most evil river djinni.’
Yakub thought about that for a few minutes, then announced, ‘Brave Yakub fears no jinnee, but he will swim with you to the city to watch over you.’
The skin bladder had leaked half its air, and they blew it tight again while they waited for the raft to reach the most advantageous point. By then the moon had risen, and although the Dervish bombardment had petered out, they could make out the city skyline clearly, and even see a few small cooking fires. They slipped into the water. Yakub was becoming more courageous by the minute and Penrod showed him how to kick with his legs and help to drive the bladder across the current.
After a laborious swim Penrod felt the bottom under his feet. He let the bladder go and dragged Yakub ashore. ‘Fearless Yakub defies all the crocodiles and jinn of this little stream.’ Yakub posed boldly on the bank and made an obscene gesture towards the Nile.
‘Yakub should close his fearless mouth,’
Penrod advised, ‘before one of the Egyptian sentries puts a bullet in his defiant backside.’ He wanted to get into the city secretly. Apart from the danger of being shot by the guards, any contact with the troops would result in him being taken immediately to General Gordon. His orders from Sir Evelyn Baring were to deliver his message to Benbrook first, and only then to report to Gordon.
Penrod had spent months in Khartoum before and after the disaster of El Obeid, so he was intimately aware of the layout of the defences and fortifications, which were concentrated along the riverfront. Keeping well outside the walls and the canal, he worked his way swiftly around the southern outskirts. When he was almost opposite the domed roof of the French consulate, he approached the canal bank. Once he was certain that it was clear, they waded across, the water only chin deep.
When they reached the other side they lay up in the palm grove to wait for the patrol to pass. Penrod whiffed the smoke of Turkish tobacco before he saw them. They sauntered past along the footpath, rifles trailing, the sergeant smoking. It was behaviour typical of the slovenly Egyptian troops.
As soon as they were gone he dropped into the drainage ditch that led to the outer city wall. The ooze stank of raw sewage, but they crawled through the tunnel, past the back wall of the French consulate and into the old town. Penrod was perturbed at how easily they had got through. Gordon’s defences must be stretched to breaking point. At the beginning of the siege he had commanded seven thousand Egyptians, but that number must have been much reduced by the attrition of disease and desertion.
They hurried through the deserted alleys, stepping round the bloated carcasses of men and animals. Even the appetite of the crows and vultures was inadequate to the task of devouring such an abundance. The stench of a city under siege assailed his nostrils, death and putrefaction. He had heard it called the cholera bouquet.
Penrod paused to pull his pocket watch from its pouch and held it to his ear. It had not survived the dousing in the river. He looked at the moon, judged that it was well after midnight, and hurried on unchallenged through the deserted streets. When they reached the gates of the consular palace there was still lamplight in a few windows. The sentry at the front gate was asleep, curled like a dog in his box. His rifle was propped against the wall, and Penrod took charge of it before he kicked him awake. It took some time and a great deal of argument with the sergeant of the guard, but despite his appearance and the smell of sewage that wafted from his robes Penrod was able at last to convince him that he was a British officer.